While there may be a lot of crowdfunding campaigns for smartphone cases, few do what PopSlate does: It turns the back of your iPhone into an e-Reader, smartwatch and charger.

PopSlate is a charging case with a 4-in. e-ink screen that when connected to mobile apps on your iPhone, turns the rear of the smartphone into a black-and-white display for information and notifications.

With 21 days left in the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, the PopSlate iPhone case has already raised $575,000, seven times its original goal of $75,000.

The screen allows phone owners to use and navigate between multiple apps simultaneously; you can, for instance, configure dashboards for popular news and information feeds for at-a-glance information.

PopSlate

The PopSlate iPhone case comes in black or white and can act as a clock with multiple faces, a news feed, a calendar alert system, and a digital wallet for displaying scannable barcodes and AR-codes for boarding passes and membership cards.

The low-power e-ink display is always on and gives users access by connecting to apps, such as weather, news and sports, social feeds, calendar alerts or e-books.

Along with being a 400-by-240-pixel resolution display, the case can also charge your iPhone with its internal lithium-ion battery. The hard case is compatible with iPhone 6, 6+, 6S, 6S+ models and adds 0.16 of an inch to the phone's thickness.

PopSlate leverages content through a provider's APIs, which then allows it to stream the info into a feed and dashboard on the e-ink screen. The screen can also act as a clock with multiple faces as well as a digital wallet for displaying scannable barcodes and AR-codes for boarding pass and membership card information.

"We have access to the most popular content integrations," the PopSlate site states. "We will continuously roll out new content streams in the coming months."

What PopSlate can't do is read Kindle e-books. Currently, the smartphone case can only access e-reading from Project Gutenberg, which offers 50,000 e-books from a library that's still growing. The company expects to have additional e-book and other content sources after the product launches in July.

The PopSlate is available in black and white and is being offered to early birds for $79 plus shipping costs.

This story, "iPhone charging case adds second screen to back of phone" was originally published by
Computerworld.